Shanghai Gold is of course still available at Amazon (including a Kindle Edition), Barnes & Noble and your local bookstores – and I very much would like to encourage everybody to go out and buy a copy. But in addition there is now also a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licensed version of the book at shanghaigold.net.

If you weren’t sure yet if this is a novel for you, start reading right now. Enjoy!

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve successfully finished NaNoWriMo with a mostly completed novel, and it took me all the way through the rest of the 2000s to edit my work.

There was also the subject of how to actually publish the novel – and after several unsuccessful attempts to interest an agent or publisher, I decided to self-publish. This is after all the age of the web, where we blow open the doors of encrusted organizations and Just Do It Ourselves, right? Right!

Well, it’s been a busy couple of years, but now, finally, Shanghai Gold has been published!

The book is now out and available at Amazon as well as from your local book store (they’ll probably have to order it for you, but hey!) and it’s making me very nervous to let go of the book and to see how it will do out in the world…

If you pick up a copy I’d be happy to hear how you liked it and please rate and review the book once you’ve read it at your favorite book seller’s website.

…and then there is her previous post, which has the one crucial advice that will make or break your POD project:

DO IT!

No matter how late at night you have stay up to get some quiet time from the kids, no matter how early in the morning you have to get up to write a page/edit a photo/draw a picture before you go to work, just do it. There is nothing worse than unfinished projects – with one exception, and that would be Projects You’ve Never Started.

And this is really not just true for Print-on-Demand, but for any kind of maker projects you’ve been dreaming of. Every day you haven’t started that dream project of yours is a day lost in a corner of the space-time continuum that we can’t access: The Past.

Don’t lose your precious projects to The Past, stop reading the intertubes right now, sit down and make something!

For some reason I hadn’t seen any announcements for this one, so dragging the hardcover book to the checkout counter filled me with glee. And it’s good – started reading it and like it a lot.

At the same time, I got my copy of Memories of the Future by Wil Wheaton. I’ve read most of the original posts that make up the base material for this book, and I already know it’s great. So I’m going to try and read it slowly to enjoy all the nuances of the final, edited book.

OK, enough blogging – I have two books to read! 

That was intriguing, since I actually had written about the MJB coffee ads in San Francisco before here and here, and all the research I had done on the mysterious MJB – WHY? ads pointed at a timeframe of after the earthquake until sometimes in the 1910s for these ads… but here was one done before the earthquake of 1906.

I mentioned this to Richard and he pointed me to a book: “Coffee, Martinis and San Francisco” by Ruth Bransten McDougall, who happens to be the daughter of the founder of MJB Coffee. It’s a spirited and very personal biography of Ruth and her parents Mannie and Renee Brandenstein (later Bransten), which begins with a scene just after the earthquake of 1906 and then moves back to the very beginnings of the MJB brand in the 1880s and on through to the 1930s.

Mannie was a born marketer, and he relished in figuratively and literally painting the town with advertisements for his products, which is why even now, one hundred years after he invented the campaign, one can still find MJB Coffee – WHY? painted on walls in the Bay Area.

Many people in the last hundred years must have passed these ads and wondered… why WHY?

Well… here’s the answer…

At one point, the young Ruth asks her dad: “Why the WHY?” and Mannie’s answer is: “What’s the difference, as long as people ask. That makes sales.”

The recent wave of layoffs in the publishing industry was probably just the beginning in a process that will eventually lead to a new equilibrium far away from the current state of the industry and all eighteen points by Bruce Sterling are worth a thought.

I don’t think any of the existing large publishing houses will survive in their current form since even if these businesses want to change at this point (and that’s a big IF), there is preciously little that can be done.

Ditch paper and go online? Yes, but the ebook market is already carpet-bombed by small startups and behemoths like Sony and Amazon.

Make everything a free download to support paid copies? Yes, but that should have been done long ago. That would have been GREAT advertisement before the Internet started to drown in free content, but now?

Go viral? Yep, like everybody else. Doesn’t help with the revenue, though.

At this point traditional publishing is dead, with the possible exception of coffee table books and niche publishers that will sprout like weeds around the edges of the old system. There will still be book stores and new books from many (many!) more smaller publishers, but the times of million-dollar advances for books and monolothic publishing deals will be over for good.

The title is The Poison Ape, and where Shinjuku Shark was an in-depth study of Tokyo police procedures, this new book is a hard, cold-edged dive into Tokyo’s brothels and the many illegal immigrants from China and Taiwan that live and work there.

Detective Samejima hasn’t changed much since the last book, but this case is definitely rougher. Samejima stumbles over a case of drug sales in Tokyo’s subways that leads on to illegal immigrants, but there is much more going on as a bloody feud between Taiwanese gangs spreads into Tokyo, rapidly decimating gang members and bystanders alike.

The book is a good read and offers insights into a Japan that a casual traveler to the country would never see, but it is also a very brutal book, probably in many ways a more truthful account of the underbelly of Tokyo’s society than most writers would dare to offer.

In case you haven’t heard of it before, the idea behind NaNoWriMo – or the National Novel Writing Month – is to write a novel in a month. Yep. One Month. Just get it over with, like ripping off a band-aid.

Now you’d be correct in saying that this is insane, and you are probably right, but it’s a very sweet kind of insanity that I can only recommend to everybody to at least try once. All you have to do is think of a rough idea for the opening of your novel, say, on October 31st, and then around midnight you open a new document on your computer and you start to type. Easy.

To “win” NaNoWriMo, you have to write 50,000 words in 30 days, or about 1666 words every night. it’s not as hard as it sounds, and my only recommendations are:

• write daily
• write without editing
• don’t plot ahead for more than one day’s worth of writing

From my experience with several failed attempts after my first win, I can also tell you that plotting ahead and working along a frozen story arc is deadly for NaNo, since there is no time to think. It’s all about having a strong idea for the opening and then let the characters do whatever they want.

So. Are you up for the challenge? Come on! There’s kids taking part in this – it’s not that hard to write 1700 words a day… it’s probably going to take you about two hours every day for a month. Just cut down on TV and instead of wasting time on somebody else’s fantasy, set your imagination free!

The book is a world-building exercise on the level of Tolkien’s best work, with a wide swath of fictional geography, history, local languages and culture fleshed out to the point of ridiculousness. There is certainly a steep learning curve during the early chapters, where a lot of concepts are introduced in short order, but things calm down a bit with long passages were actually not much is going on other than Stephenson cementing the world he has created for this rather extraordinary story to live in.

But even these slow sequences are full of great details and sparkly little ideas that make this a typical Stephenson novel, that often feel like a grand tour through the brain of a genius.

I really enjoyed how much of the early philosophical concepts and historical background become crucial parts of the story as it unfolds in the second half of the book – I found that to be a nice payoff for what early on feels like overindulgence on Stephenson’s part.

The last third of the book takes the reader into a surprising direction, with the pacing picking up quickly and a rather amazing few chapters at the end where the book reminded me a lot of the action sequences in Snow Crash.

All in all I very much enjoyed Anathem and can highly recommend it to all Neal Stephenson fans. If you are new to Stephenson, check out Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon and if you like those, Anathem should be on your must-read list.

We all seem to have very different needs to get into a creative zone and to work on something that we have to create in our minds out of nothing. And professional writers are pretty much the endurance champions in creating new things. They spend many hours every day staring at a wall or a bunch of pictures or out the window. They write and read a lot and their desks usually show the traces of this work with piles of books and papers scattered everywhere.

The writer’s rooms collection is an interesting window into the minds of these writers and I can only recommend checking out those messy desks… makes it so much easier to put off cleaning my own desk.